Reliability is an important issue for any company involved in such activities as manufacturing, assembling, or selling parts, assemblies, or products. A part, assembly, or product having a low reliability may have high warranty claims or customer dissatisfaction. The longer the problem goes unnoticed or without corrective action, the higher the number or cost of warranty claims or the greater the customer dissatisfaction.
Previous problem tracking techniques have looked at claims or cost associated with high warranty parts, and/or high frequency of failure parts. Using any of these techniques separately can allow moderate frequency and moderate warranty problems to escape early detection. In addition, newly produced parts having high frequency of failure or high warranty problems can be shielded from early detection due to the relatively small population of recently produced machines with the problem part.
Previous tracking techniques may have only looked at a part relative to a particular product. If the part is used across multiple products, the problems may take longer to detect because the magnitude of the problem may not be recognized when analyzing the reliability of the part as it relates only to a single product.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.